Skinner Box
Something small and scary for you. Very scary.
This story is presented to you by the wonderfully witchy
along with the , as part of their little scarefest known either as Small & Scary, for cute little Substacks like mine with fewer than 200 subscribers, or Big & Beastly for you lucky popular writers with more than 200.Click ye here to check out all the other stories.
I got into a slight little anxiety on Saturday when I had the grand total of zero words for my story. But then around teatime the first line popped into my head, as first lines often do, and several hours later I had 2,700 words. I did some minor edits on Sunday and added another 300 words, so now it is done.
And I am very grateful to be a part of this, because I would never have written this story otherwise.
I have taken up this challenge - some might say unwisely - to attempt to scare the fucking shit out of you.
Far be it from me to disappoint.
I will not disappoint you with a long intro this time, however, except to suggest the usual trope/device of ‘it’s true it’s not a story’, in the hope you might not be able to dissociate yourself from it and tell your brain ‘it couldn’t possibly be real’ and ‘it’s only a story’ and ‘it’s behind that screen’.
I think true terror can only be experienced when you are no longer able to divorce yourself from the knowledge that the object of the terror does indeed inhabit the same world as you.
I will elaborate on this in an outro after the story, in which I will give you a little historical background [Correction - my outro got too long so I have transplanted it into a separate post, Inside the Skinner Box, which you can read there - either before or after reading this, intriguingly]. But feel free to skip that if you like. For now, though, if you do want to receive an implanted suggestion though, then this is the link for you. The title alone should be sufficient.
I don’t think so-called trigger warnings are necessary, though, as I very much doubt anyone reading this will have personally experienced what happens in the story.
I should also mention though that for those familiar with my Katrina serialisation this vignette is a kind of teaser-spoiler/backstory/flashback thing. If you are keeping up with Katrina you will have already met the main character in this vignette, Katyusha, in the previous instalment, Scene 41, which you can read there. Fragment 49, which you can read there, will also make more sense once you’ve read this present story. In fact reading this will add quite a lot to that scene.
In the hope of achieving a little self-discipline when it comes to intros, I will now shut myself up. Except to let you know that the story, if you include the title, is 3k words exactly. I did consider finding two more words to add but told myself that’s just silly.
Anyway, here is a scary real image for you, slightly pertinent to all this.
Skinner Box
Phase Two of the mind control training commenced when they injected little Katyusha, two and a half years’ old by that time, with LSD-25 and subjected her to the Skinner Box.
It is the Witching Hour in the Year of our Devil, two thousand and six, in the quickly sweltering month of June, and we are on the outskirts of Kiev, Western Ukraine.
To be more specific, this is sub-basement three.
From a distance, you might think this compound resembles any other industrial park with its metal and stone warehouses but look more closely – although we don’t advise that – and you will note that the twenty-metre-high fence embracing the compound is highly electrified. What you will not see are the teams of security lurking in their observation chambers with an array of heavy automatic weapons perched up against the wall. Their task, should any law enforcement squad which didn’t get the memo not to interfere decide to commit an assault, would be to spray the area indiscriminately to keep the enemy pinned down whilst everyone makes their exit along the kilometre-long tunnel leading from a concealed door in sub-basement four.
It is just as well these specially constructed buildings are heavily soundproofed, because for the first three, perhaps four months, before the screaming and the whimpering stops, if you were to be permitted a glimpse into Hangars One and Two, you would see dozens of small, metal-enmeshed cages strewn across the cold floor.
The children are in those cages.
But that’s Phase One.
When the initial splits occur.
Now we are commencing Phase Two. And little Katyusha is responding very well indeed. By this time, she already knows herself to be the Queen Mother. Her task is simple. Keep System safe. Mother the Kittens and hold System together. And Obey.
Katyusha was the first split. Two months’ earlier. The Core is already dreaming in her Sleeping Beauty Palace deep in the mind’s internal world. She must never come out again. Never.
Katyusha is responding well, they believe. Fear is in abeyance. Which is just as well, because she is a member of her owner’s own bloodline and they have been told, in no uncertain terms, to return her in perfect condition. Her mother was beautiful and her father too. Both of them intelligent and creative. Her mother is a virtuoso on the piano. Her father was a scientist. Katyusha will look just like her when she’s older. Bible-black hair and deep marble-brown eyes and delicate, yet striking features. A little pixie-ish, perhaps. Faerie-touched. And haunted with a seriousness belying her young years.
Yes, little Katyusha is responding very well. She has already split a further six times already. Her fragmenting psyche has given birth to six kittens, all with names evocative of the first six numbers of the Russian language.
There will be more splits to come. As the brain develops, so too will they develop into fully-fledgling identities of their own. Her owner has requested thirty-two in total, not including the Core. Katyusha is to be returned to him in Bavaria with her Obedience Protocol firmly embedded and triple-tested, with the twelve kittens already programmed, along with Temperance, the filter, and Tori, the Tower who will provide stability, structure and foundation to the System. All other splits, up to the final number thirty-two, are to be left blank for the Owner’s personal advanced programmers to work on at their leisure, personalising the slave to his own predilections or agenda.
Split number fifteen after Katyusha, especially, lying between Tempe and Tori, is to be left open for the demon, when the invocation time arrives.
But what Ivan Kamerensky, the chief programmer, does not know, is that this demon, this Succubus, who will be called Suki, when that time comes, will be the very last thing he ever sees.
But that is for the future. Fifteen more years hence when she excises his still beating heart and the ritual sacrifice will break the spell.
That is for Paris in the winter.
But here, now, in this Witching Hour, he is in total control.
If you wish to picture him, think of a colossal heavily-built, dark blonde Ukrainian Ultra with harsh abrasive stubble and piercing blue eyes who cut his cross in the SBU. You might think him a psychopath, but he would object to that accusation. He is not a psychopath, he would say, he is simply clinical. He towers over the little ones and may as well be the Norse God of Trauma, as far as they are concerned. He retrieves each one from their confinement with one vast hand gripping their neck. And then up against the wall.
Good little Caterpillar Girls, he sings.
Good girls, ride the silvery wings…
He and his team shall be paid the sum of one million Euros for each correctly programmed and verified multiple returned to their respective owners. Aside from the hired mercenaries acting as security, who are necessarily not told anything about what happens inside those buildings, by the time he sees the demon, Suki, he and his team will number no more than eight. They can produce some twenty or so each year. This is the thirteenth year of operation.
Most of the money is deposited in a certain bank in Switzerland. Ivan and the team are considering retiring in perhaps another seventeen years. Thirty years times twenty slaves times one million. Six hundred, divided by eight.
Across the dark world, there are five thousand other programming teams, just like them.
Three million Manchurian Candidates to be embedded into the globalist hierarchy.
Just so long as they never mention such things in the Popular Press.
This is a modified Skinner Box. But by the time Katyusha finds that out, the LSD-25 will have taken its hold over her neurotransmitters, and she will believe herself to be somewhere else. Where that somewhere else is, depends partly on the implanted suggestions, and partly on her own creative imagination. By this time, it should also be noted, she is also acutely aware that her very survival depends on just how creative she can be.
This is how to make a genius. This, indeed, is how the Master Race is made.
The metal box looks as follows. It measures some two metres wide by three metres long by one metre high. The only light is a very dim redness. A glow, more than a light. The floor, a crisscross grille of metal is, naturally, electrified, but split into two separately controllable halves. Two of the walls on one half are temperature controlled, along with that half of the floor. The temperatures can be ranged from minus twenty degrees Celsius to plus eighty.
Of course, the subject will quickly learn to stay in the safe zone. They will learn Obedience. They will learn helplessness.
Then the testing begins. Along one wall is a series of levers. Each is numbered and of a different colour. It starts easy. Pulling the correct lever will turn off the electric shocks.
Perhaps you may also be permitted a cup of water. Laced with LSD-25 to maintain the correct level.
But it’s not the same lever each time. You must learn to trust your intuition. You must develop your psychic ability. And you will need to learn pattern recognition.
Sometimes you will have to beg him to tell you the correct lever. Learned helplessness.
Later, it will be two different levers in succession. Then three. Then four. Then Five.
When six happens the trapdoor will open.
And Katyusha will believe she can escape. Because getting out of that box has become the only thing that matters now. When your pure and very survival depends on responding well to the operant conditioning then you will, indeed, develop powers you never thought possible.
Except we are no longer in a dark metal box. The LSD-25 has already seen to that.
She will have to crawl through a very small opening and she will have to tolerate the burning and the electric shocks. The opening is barely half a metre by half a metre and although she is not yet even three years’ old she will have to desperately squeeze herself through.
And now she is in the tunnel.
She doesn’t know it’s made of metal. As far as the LSD-25 is telling her, she has burst through into a cave system. She is deep under the ground. She is smothered inside her own mind.
And she is not alone here.
She is not alone, when the lights go suddenly out.
And the trapdoor slams and bolts shut behind her.
And then she frantically bashes her hands to all sides and is trapped as if in a coffin. To move forward she can only drag herself. There is no room for manoeuvre here. There is no turning around. There is no going back.
But she will not suffocate.
This is a modified Skinner Box, attached to the Human Puzzle Box.
By the time she gets out, if she ever does, there will almost certainly be more dissociative splits, new alters for the collection. Thirty-two in total, after all, shall be required.
Half of this terror may be a simulation. But the other half, oh that half is real.
Katyusha must learn not to panic in this confined space. She will have to learn self-control. Her very survival depends upon it, remember. Hyperventilation is not an option.
Not in this confinement.
Only creative intelligence and determination and discipline will keep her in life.
If there is nothing to be seen, then close your eyes.
Close your eyes, and feel your way through.
Her neurotransmitters have lost all sense of time. Time does not exist anyway, it’s just a quirk of sense-perception. Everything is one. Everything is interconnected. Everything merges and everything is harmony.
There is no difference anymore between you, and the walls of the cave. They and you melt to the hot touch.
Or whatever it is that suddenly brushes past your fingers. And then another. And another.
They too, as they patter and crawl over your skin become a permanent presence. LSD-25 is a reuptake inhibitor. The sensation of them will remain and escalate. It shall crawl.
Just as well you can’t see them and you no longer fear the dark. Just as well you have no fear of spiders.
Just as well you have no fear of the coffin or confined space.
You can sense a faint breeze from somewhere. A draught of cool air. Then the walls to both sides give way to emptiness. You edge forwards a little and it is clear you are at a crossroads. Should you head towards the wind? To the left there? Or is it another lure?
Tentatively to the left, before you quickly withdraw your hand as it scrapes against something jagged. Blood seeps out of you. And then again. The sound of its drip-feed escalates and becomes the monotonous echo of the cave system. The sides of the tunnel here are encrusted with razor-edged shards. If you venture that way, you will bleed. Unless you can squeeze tiny enough.
But we don’t think you can do that.
A self-preservation instinct, perhaps, tells little Katyusha to turn rightwards.
She creeps a little way on.
Before the lights flash on red and off red again and on red again and off red again and she screams at the severed head in the tunnel staring back at her.
The torso is there on the other side beyond, behind glass. The spiders are clustering together and feeding on it.
But it only takes her six breaths now to stop her hyperventilation. Suppress and control the fight or flight.
She edges backwards to the junction but her bare feet bleed.
A river of blood in the reuptake inhibition.
She hears it in tune with the tone of her breath as it rasps through her the back of her throat.
Perhaps she is growing up three times faster than normal children of her age. Accelerating heart.
The crimson strobe light continues to ebb and flow, ebb and flow. She glances back the way she came and there, in the ceiling. There is a little square panel, she can see the seams.
She edges towards it, pulling herself by her claws. Push up. It gives only slightly. But she doesn’t have the strength.
She is not even three years yet.
It will require some kind of tool, she quickly realises. Creative intelligence. He father was a scientist.
She pushes herself backwards, with an undulating movement like a little centipede. She is at the junction once more and can examine the jagged walls in the silent red pulsing. Perhaps she can kick out some of these rock-shards. But to do that, she will have to move into the tunnel with the severed head and look at it as she kicks back.
But it is dead now and will not hurt her.
It’s not the first dead thing she has seen in this dark palace, after all.
But if that glass panel were to silently raise itself, those monsters will scent you.
She kicks, and kicks, and there is a sudden splintering and a skittering clang as it breaks off the wall.
She gathers it towards her with her lower leg, and can just about squeeze her arm down to reach it whilst she is at this junction.
It will cut her, for sure, but this is not the first time she has felt herself bleeding out in this dark palace.
She edges back, shifts herself around and crawls towards the place where the panel is. She inserts the shard into the seam and scrapes it back and forth, feels a catch and levers it.
The trapdoor bursts downwards with a screech, swings a few times and then comes to a rest, hanging there.
She pulls herself forwards and twists her head up to see. There are metal handholds there. She grabs one but then suddenly recoils, that reflex action against scalding.
She reaches up further to the next one. Scalding.
Part of this mind control, Katyusha, is for you to learn how to switch off those autonomic responses. By the end of all this trauma, you will have total control over your own inner cerebral processes. Conscious control.
Normal people never get that. You don’t know this now, but you will one day be happy. Happy to be superior.
And you will be loyal to the Master Race. To your own bloodline.
To this Cabal.
Behind her, the glass, separating the head from the torso, slowly begins to slide upwards.
There are thousands of them now, smothering that torso in a vivacious roiling as if a thick, black carpet were swimming over it. Like piranhas might, perhaps.
Then when there is only bones, and the bones picked clean before the flesh is clean gone they will separate into their little clusters and they will start to scamper towards you.
You will hear them.
So if you wish to survive, you will overcome those autonomic reactions and you will climb.
But you will not panic. You will not be scared.
And you shall be disciplined.
Everything is heightened in the LSD-25 phase. In the years to come, perhaps Katyusha will never be sure it even happened at all. And if it ever did, it was only ever a dream.
But she wants to survive.
It was the purpose from which she was born. A copy of the Core, the original, designed only to take her place and experience the trauma so beautiful Catriona would not have to. So she could be put to dream in the Sleeping Beauty Palace and surrounded by walls higher than the sky and a moat deeper than the ocean and thick briar rose through which only the pure in heart may pass.
But she must never wake up. That prince must never come.
For this world is wrong and not made for the likes of her.
Send her to another world. Make a portal in that palace and let her cross over. Cross over to the other side. Let her spend her life in a parallel world where her mother never left her and she knew only love. Love, and safety. And light.
And lightness of being.
But in this world, Purgatory demands perseverance. There is a penance to be done.
If you were to glance behind you now, you would see those clusters gathering back together and sensing you. It will take them only an instant to snap the decision to pursue you.
So little Katyusha seizes a huge breath and grabs a hold of the rungs and pulls herself up and climbs as fast as she can and dissociates away the pain. She dissociates. She dissociates.
Two more splits. Two more new alters for the cauldron. Six more rungs to go and then there is another horizontal passage and a glass door you can slide back down behind you with your bare feet just as the scampering horde smashes impotently into it.
She, or one of her new children, further copies of herself, her fragmented multiple personality System, frantically shifts herself forward until suddenly, the floor beneath her gives way and she tumbles.
Tumbles and crashes back down onto metal.
A crisscross grille of metal.
And the trapdoor slams shut above her.
Then the dim, crimson glow begins to illuminate this place.
She swivels her little head around and there, lined up along the wall, she sees the levers.
As the electrified floor initiates its sequence for one more time.
And then there will be another.
And another.
Until she finally finds her path out of the labyrinth.
And the fear circuits in her brain shall be irrevocably destroyed.
And then Phase Three will commence.
You will be a beautiful butterfly, Katyusha, when this is all over.
And you will know that Good Girls, ride the silvery wings…
If you need to take yourself a drink at this stage, be my guest. Then you can return and read this little outro.
Alternately you really can skip all this if you like and just scroll down, click that lonely like button, and ride off into the sunset. I will not be upset if you choose that option.
Actually - given that what I intended as a short outro to the story turned into two thousand words, I thought better of it, as it might annoy some people and spoil the whole thing, so I have decided to essentially copy and paste it into a new, accompanying post (which I shall schedule for posting around the same time as this one). So, you can read Inside the Skinner Box there - it’ll give you some juicy insights into what lies behind the story (and some teasery stuff for Katrina too).
For these images, by the way, I just told the Great Image Generator to do something like ‘small female child with dark hair in an operant conditioning chamber lit only by dim red glow’ or similar. Some of them turned out so well I simply had to include them.
Anyway, that is it for my behind-the-story outro thing. I hope I didn’t terrorise or upset you too much. I do admit it’s a pretty fucking scary story, especially as it involves a child, and people are naturally sensitive about that. But I also think some of our best horror writers are those who have indeed genuinely experienced the dark side. Perhaps I should consider writing more horror stuff.
If you liked this - sorry, ‘liked’ or ‘enjoyed’ is probably the wrong word - ‘appreciated’ (that’s better) this story, then please drop me a like, share, comment and so on - each of which makes me very happy and grateful.
If this has made you intrigued about my Katrina serialisation, you can catch up with the story so far at the Intermission post, at that link.
I also did another scary story, also based on some of my own dark childhood memories, called Child Game Hunts, which you can read there.
If you’d like to subscribe, here is a lovely button just for you!
And another lovely thing is that people now have the delightful option of feeding my caffeine addiction and buying me a coffee, which you can do there.
Anyway, I am very grateful to you for reading this far, and totally grateful indeed for Garen & the TiF Team for organising this little scarefest. I would not have written this story otherwise.
Well, now I get to read all the other scary stuff. And so too can you - at this link here.
Once I’ve had a stiff drink, naturally.
TTFN, as the good doctor Lecter said…
Glorious and disturbing. Your prose was perfection. The claustrophobic nightmare you spun will be with me for a while yet!
This is powerful and effective. I've heard enough stories from SRA survivors that I find it more heartbreaking than anything else. I hope this sows seeds that will wake someone up to the reality of this kind of evil.